New York Times Columnist Nick Kristof — and Klaus Brinkbäumer, Deputy Editor in Chief of the German Newspaper Der Spiegel — Described the United States in the Ludicrous that Light We Deserve

© 2013 Peter Free

 

17 July 2013

 

 

Americans have trouble rationally prioritizing threats — with some damaging overreactions

 

Take our response to terrorism.

 

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently turned to numbers to show how insanely overblown America’s reaction to terrorism is:

 

 

The imbalance in our priorities is particularly striking because since 2005, terrorism has taken an average of 23 American lives annually, mostly overseas — and the number has been falling.

 

More Americans die of falling televisions and other appliances than from terrorism. Twice as many Americans die of bee or wasp stings annually.

 

And 15 times as many die by falling off ladders.

 

Most striking, more than 30,000 people die annually from firearms injuries, including suicides, murders and accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

American children are 13 times as likely to be killed by guns as in other industrialized countries.

 

Doesn’t it seem odd that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars, and intercept metadata from just about every phone call in the country, to deal with a threat that, for now, kills but a few Americans annually — while we’re too paralyzed to introduce a rudimentary step like universal background checks to reduce gun violence that kills tens of thousands?

 

Nicholas D. Kristof, How Could We Blow This One?, New York Times (03 July 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

 

Our typical response to criticisms like Mr. Kristof’s does not survive logical muster

 

The characteristically heated reply to Kristof’s numbers-based critique is that our anti-terrorist apparatus is directly responsible for the low number of deaths from terrorist activities.

 

But — without the proof that Government secrecy and dishonesty deny us — that is like saying that putting our left socks on before our right ones prevents evil.

 

 

Are we culturally ill? — Klaus Brinkbäumer, no fool, thinks so

 

The deputy editor-in-chief of Germany’s Der Spiegel wrote:

 

 

America is sick.

 

The global spying scandal shows that the US has become manic, that it is behaving pathologically, invasively. Its actions are entirely out of proportion to the danger.

 

It is as monstrous and as unlawful as Guantanamo Bay, where for 11 and a half years, men have been detained and force-fed, often without evidence against them, many of whom are still there to this day.

 

It is as unlawful as the drones that are killing people, launched with a mere signature from Obama.

 

An American government that gives its blessing to a program like Prism respects nothing and no one. It acts out its omnipotence, considers itself above international law . . . .

 

What greater good justifies this breach of law by the US and the cooperation of German agencies? It is time for answers.

 

© 2013 Klaus Brinkbäumer, NSA Snooping: The War on Terror Is America's Mania, Spiegel Online International (16 July 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

 

The critical question — which the sleeping American public refuses to answer

 

Herr Brinkbäumer asks:

 

 

[D]oes the free America that should be defended even still exist, or has it abolished itself through its own defense?

 

America’s most precious gift to the world is withering away of our own volition.

 

 

The moral? — Uncontrolled fear makes us insane

 

We hide our cowardice from personal self-perception by ecstatically indulging in unreasoned anti-terrorist mania.  No cost in dollars and vanished freedoms seems too high to bear.